Jagdeo to com­plain to IDB over al­leged pro­cure­ment vi­o­la­tions

Op­po­si­tion leader Bhar­rat Jagdeo says he plans to com­plain to the In­ter-Amer­i­can Devel­op­ment Bank (IDB) over al­leged breaches of the pro­cure­ment laws by gov­ern­ment, which he blames for the sloth in im­ple­men­ta­tion of the Pub­lic Sec­tor In­vest­ment Pro­gramme (PSIP).

“If you go to the Min­istry of Pub­lic [In­fra­struc­ture] and the gov­ern­ment on the whole, you will see the dis­mal fail­ure in ef­fect­ing the [PSIP]. So much so, that the IDB to­day is say­ing that they want to help them set up some de­liv­ery units. But the IDB needs to know that the lack of de­liv­ery on the con­tract is not be­cause they are not aware of the pro­ce­dures, it is be­cause of the cor­rup­tion. So, I hope the IDB doesn’t get en­tan­gled in this farce,” Jagdeo told a press con­fer­ence last Thurs­day.

He charged that re­tender­ing for projects sub­verts the pro­cure­ment laws and he said he would write the IDB to high­light the sit­u­a­tion. “We are gath­er­ing up a file to do this,” he added.

Last Wed­nes­day, the IDB an­nounced that it was work­ing with the David Granger-led gov­ern­ment on im­prov­ing the per­for­mance of the PSIP and that this could see the pos­si­ble set­ting up of a “De­liv­ery Unit” to man­age re­sults.

Re­cently, Min­is­ter of Fi­nance Win­ston Jor­dan also lamented the sloth in the im­ple­men­ta­tion of the PSIP.

The IDB, in a state­ment, said its coun­try of­fice had en­gaged the ser­vices of De­liv­ery As­so­ciates (DA), a con­sult­ing firm spe­cial­is­ing in sup­port­ing the im­prove­ment of the ef­fec­tive­ness and ac­count­abil­ity of govern­ments world­wide. It noted that DA has al­ready com­pleted a di­ag­nos­tic anal­y­sis of how Guyana’s PSIP works, in­clud­ing an anal­y­sis of its de­liv­ery chain and that the firm was co­or­di­nat­ing with the IDB to fi­nalise the di­ag­nos­tic re­port to the au­thor­i­ties, which would iden­tify op­por­tu­ni­ties for im­prove­ments and present the model for de­liv­ery or im­ple­men­ta­tion of the find­ings.

The IDB added that most coun­tries adopt a model called a de­liv­ery unit or an im­ple­men­ta­tion unit, a sim­ple sys­tem­atic process through which sys­tem lead­ers drive progress and achieve re­sults specif­i­cally of cap­i­tal projects car­ried out by govern­ments.

But Jagdeo said on Thurs­day that the work of the IDB may be in vain as it is the pro­cure­ment laws that are be­ing bro­ken. He sug­gested that it was the way the sys­tem is set up for works to be pro­cured in the re­spec­tive re­gions that al­lows for this to take place. “This gov­ern­ment has put in place all these REOs [Re­gional Ex­ec­u­tive Of­fi­cers]. These REOs are the Chair­man of the Ten­der Board [in each re­gion]. They change the pro­cure­ment rules when they want to, when there is cor­rupt ac­tiv­i­ties. For ex­am­ple, in Re­gion Six, buy­ing drugs for ten times the cost from the same com­pany, the same day, ten times. Ten dif­fer­ent con­tracts in a sin­gle day. The whole state is in a prob­lem,” he said.

Suc­ces­sive ad­min­is­tra­tions led by the PPP/C, in­clud­ing Jagdeo’s, had also been ac­cused of sim­i­lar prac­tices.